Hopeful after surviving pandemic, Boulder store
Workers find terror, death
BOULDER — All Darcy Lopez could feel was terror. When the shooting began Monday afternoon, the cheese shop manager at King Soopers hid in a storage cabinet just big enough to fit her body. After what she thinks was an hour, long after the shots and shouting had stopped, she looked out and saw a police officer’s laser sight flickering across the freezer doors.
Ms. Lopez, 46, tried to scream but found she had no voice. A co-worker who had squeezed behind a refrigerator called out instead. An officer led them to the exit.
“I didn’t even look around. I just wanted to get the hell out of there,” said Ms. Lopez. “I think about how last Thursday, I got my vaccine shot. What a hopeful day that was. Then a few days later, mystore gets shot up.”
For more than a year, the pandemic has been the menace hanging over the heads of the employees at King Soopers, as it did for grocery store workers across the country. After what seemed like an impossibly difficult year — one marked repeatedly by difficult encounters with mask refusing customers — the sudden, bloody assault on
King Soopers seemed bewildering. How could colleagues and customers die this way afterall they had survived?
“The pandemic feels like a decade ago after all of this,” Ms. Lopez said.
Among the 10 people killed by the gunman were three grocery employees: Denny Stong, 20; Teri Leiker, 51; and RikkiOlds, 25.
Ms. Olds was a front-end manager with a sunny disposition in the face of pandemic stressors. If an employee had a bad encounter with a mask refusing customer, or a close talking customer, or a customer angry at a product being out of stock, Ms. Olds lightened the mood.
“She would tell a joke or offer to hit you with her cart, and you can go home early with your injury,” said Carlee Lough, Ms. Olds’ coworker and friend. “Rikki had just such a fun spirit.”
“You had a lot of families with kids not in school, so the parents are providing a meal they weren’t before,” said Ms. Lough, who was not working when the shooting happened. “People started making their own bread. We couldn’t keep yeast on the shelf. We were out of flour every other day, people couldn’t understand, like, ‘It’s flour, how don’t you have that?’ People get really frustrated.”